The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  In his youth, he was, in fact, as near infallible as a great player can be: he was so, by cutting down on, by almost completely eliminating, risk. Cardus, in one of his most memorable essays, ‘Hutton and Hobbs and the Classical Style’, has written: ‘He is perfect at using the dead bat – rendering it passive, a blanket of a buffer, against which spin or sudden rise from the pitch come into contact as though with an anaesthetic.’ This defensive resourcefulness, based on a perfect and calculated technique, was certainly part of his genius: he made no moves that were not absolutely certain of success. His strength and superiority were likewise in his preparations, in his asceticism, his conservations of energy, his power of withdrawal till the right moment. He had the single-mindedness which Bradman also possessed, which enabled him to be solitary and to convey through the rigours of his own self-communings an air of nobility. He inspired admiration, rather than love, but that was his birthright, rather than, I suspect, his wish. The age and the situation created his character, and he respected them as forces to which the wise man bows assent.

  Unexpectedly, but logically, he came to captain England: and to new problems he brought the same professional skill, the same monastic care as he had previously devoted to the problems of batting. Batting now became the lesser thing, indulged in with no less responsibility, but with greater abstractedness, as if his mind was on deeper strategies. His captaincy on the field was as evidently controlled and rehearsed as used to be his every innings, though it had limitations and obscurities. Nevertheless, he was a successful, as well as a lucky, captain, and his record against Australia will remain for everyone to see.

  Whatever criticisms can ever be laid against him, he never spared himself; he seemed often on the point of exhaustion. I remember saying to him at Sydney that I should like to see him play a handful of innings in which, free of worry, he could bat ‘just for fun’. He nodded thoughtfully. At Leeds last summer, when he was already out of Test cricket, he turned to me and said: ‘A hundred or two will put me right, a few runs’, and he looked up quizzically, as if he found them strange words to say, ‘made just for fun.’

  It seems we shall have to do without the fun. We shall not again in serious play watch the beautiful ease of his stance at the wicket, the tugging of the shorter left arm at the cap peak, the thoughtful walk, toes slightly turned out, between the overs, the barometric sounding of the pitch. His mannerisms are part of contemporary cricket. A writer, a painter, however, live on through their work: a cricketer leaves only statistics and memories. Hutton’s statistics require no repetition. But I shall remember, among many things about him, the unique drama of his last great Test innings at Lord’s against Australia. He had, not long before he went in to bat, put down three catches, none easy nor greatly difficult either, and some unkind mockery had greeted him each time he subsequently stopped the ball.

  When he went out to open the England innings with Kenyon, he looked even paler than usual, a frail, feverish magnetic figure, with an audience more critical than fond watching him walk to where Lindwall performed his tigerish preliminary antics and Miller lazily fondled the shining red ball. I felt then he would make nought – or a hundred. He made 145, a flawless innings. He cut exquisitely, drove gorgeously square, flicked the ball off his legs as it swung late into him. Next day the Members rose to him, and so they should have done. It was a peculiarly Huttonish triumph.

  ‘I am writing this at 3 a.m., unable to sleep because of the pain down my right leg’ – so he wrote to me in a letter this autumn. ‘In the real dark night of the soul,’ observed F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American chronicler of the Jazz Age, ‘it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.’ Well, it would not have been worth it, not just for a season or two’s fun: so Hutton has retired. Fun after all is a by-product; what went before was much more important. In so far as a game can produce great moments in life, Hutton has contributed to more of them probably than anyone else of his generation. For these, Leonard, thank you, as for much else; and Good Luck.

  Can Nothing Be Done?

  Can nothing be done for J. B. Hobbs

  To make him sometimes get out for blobs?

  Or is he doomed for some dreadful crime

  To make centuries till the end of time?

  An eminent Harley Street specialist

  Says that a nervous action of wrist,

  Combined with a lesion of eyes and feet

  Which is rapidly growing more complete

  Through long indulgence without restraint,

  Has at last become an organic complaint,

  And only a rest in a nursing-home

  And elbow-baths with electric foam,

  Or using a bat of exiguous size

  And wearing a bandage over the eyes

  And batting left-handed after tea,

  Can uproot this obstinate malady.

  Hobbs went to be ‘psychoed’ the other day,

  And the psychoanalyst said to him ‘Pray,

  Can you remember in early youth

  Some terrible shock? Now tell me the truth.’

  And Hobbs remembered at last and told

  How, when a boy of four years old

  And a naughty boy, he was rather fond

  Of chasing ducks in the farmer’s pond;

  And once he chased a particular duck

  So far away from its native muck

  That it failed at last in wind and leg,

  Sat down on the grass and laid an egg;

  And Hobbs, triumphant, without alarm

  Brought back the egg to show at the farm,

  Expecting, of course, to be praised and thanked;

  But he wasn’t: he got severely spanked.

  And the psychoanalyst, looking wise,

  Said to Hobbs, who had tears in his eyes,

  ‘It is easy to see how the complex grew

  Till a duck became a terror to you.

  What you ought to do is go and slay

  A covey of wild ducks every day,

  Or go and see Henrik Ibsen’s play,

  Or keep a duck for a household pet,

  And dine upon duck’s-egg omelette.’

  The MCC have at last been moved

  To try, if his health is not improved,

  To lift from the mind of Hobbs its load

  By adding these words to their legal code

  Where the ways are mentioned of getting out,

  Which do very well for us, no doubt:

  ‘Excepting Hobbs, who must always be given

  Out by the Umpire at eighty-seven.’

  (A rhyme like that, which is painful to me,

  Seems sound, of course, to the MCC.)

  But, suppose the amendment does not pass,

  Hobbs will be no better off, alas!

  Hobbs will go on with both arms aching

  For ever and ever century-making.

  Unless he follows the doctor’s advice,

  Or uses a bat without any splice,

  Or slippery boots without any nails,

  Or ties an invisible thread to the bails,

  He will go on for ever enduring the rigours

  Of reaching the three ineffable figures.

  Can nothing be done for J. B. Hobbs

  To make him sometimes get out for blobs?

  ‘EVOE’

  FROM

  MILLER

  TO

  TENDULKAR

  One of the most popular sides in cricket history was the Australian Services team of 1945. Assembled at the conclusion of the Second World War, this side toured England, India and Australia, spreading joy and cheer, the games they played signalling the end of death and deprivation.

  The most charismatic of these ex-Servicemen was the fighter pilot Keith Ross Miller. In the fifth of the ‘Victory’ Tests, played at Lord’s, Miller hit a rapid-fire 185, including a six off Jim Laker that landed in the commentator’s box. He had previously been only a batsman, but when the team’s opening bowler went home he took the new ball himself.
For a decade after 1945 Miller was the leading all-round cricketer in the world. He was also a man with film-star looks. We carry here a tribute to Miller by Ray Robinson, the premier Australian cricket writer of his generation, a widely travelled reporter who wrote for major newspapers in his homeland and in England and India as well. As the Oxford Companion to Australian Cricket has remarked, Robinson’s skill lay ‘in providing the cultural, personal and statistical context of his subjects so that his portrayal of cricket and his players had a great breadth’. These talents are in evidence in this essay, as indeed in Robinson’s other contributions to this anthology.

  RAY ROBINSON

  Touch of a Hero (1951)

  Long before Keith Miller gets near the wicket you can tell that something extraordinary is going to happen. The erect set of his capless head on his square shoulders, the loose swing of his long legs, the half-smile on his handsome face and his general ease of manner all signify that no ordinary cricketer approaches.

  Then there is the crowd’s greeting. In weight and duration the applause may be no more, often less, than Bradman was accustomed to receive as tribute to the weight of his run-getting, the duration of his innings, the skill of his batting and the dramatic crescendo of his scoring. The ear detects different qualities in the applause for Miller. It contains so much pleasurable expectation, as if the hands are clapping, in some kind of morse of their own: ‘This will be good.’ But the keynote is a shriller sound – the whistling of the boys. Especially at Sydney or Melbourne, it swells to a joyous volume not heard since Jack Gregory came out to play in the years after World War I. It is a sign that here is the youngsters’ hero. The place these two strapping adventurers of cricket won in the hearts of the keenest watchers present is not to be earned by enough runs to pack a warehouse, or an average like a skyscraper, or enough wickets to fill a quarry. It is a place involuntarily given them by those who have enjoyed seeing them bat and bowl and catch more excitingly than anybody else, unless it has been Constantine in his inspired moments.

  To young eyes, quickest to perceive the things that make cricket, Miller is as an Olympian god among mortals. He brings boys’ dreams to life. He is the cricketer they would all like to be, the one who can hit more gloriously and bowl faster than anybody on earth. When Neville Cardus called him a young eagle among crows and daws Miller was not a champion playing out of his class; sharing the field with him were the elect of the world’s two greatest cricketing countries, Bradman, Hammond and bearers of other famous names, Compton and other men of personality.

  Masculine as Tarzan, he plays lustily. Style suffuses his cricket with glowing power, personality charges it with daring and knocks bowling and conventions sky-high.

  Since World War II Miller has made his mark on pavilion roofs across half the earth. He was not clear of his teens when the war began; before long it hid from view a youth from Melbourne High School who at eighteen had scored 181 against Tasmania in his first innings in first-class cricket and, just twenty, overcame the difficulties of Grimmett’s bowling in making 108 against South Australia in his fourth match in the Sheffield Shield competition. As a flying officer of twenty-five he gave up piloting Mosquitoes in 1945 to become the mainstay of the Australian Services’ batting. As such, he seldom lifted the ball in the Victory Tests, but towards the end of the season he began coping with coping-stones and other upstair targets around English cricket fields. In his 185 for the Dominions he drove England’s bowlers to seven spots among the buildings enclosing Lord’s ground. The Times’ own R. B. Vincent, discriminating and droll, began to wonder whether Lord’s was a big enough ground for such terrific hitting. The first and furthest six crashed into the top-tier seats between the towers of the pavilion. Next morning one with less carry struck the southern tower, above the broadcasters’ eyrie. They were among the highest blows Lord’s pavilion had felt this century, though they left intact the all-time record by an earlier exile from Victoria, Albert Trott, who in 1899 drove a ball over the hallowed edifice. Miller lifted his overnight total by 124 before lunch on the last day of the match. Only such an innings as his 185 could have won the game. A week later he opened his forty-inch chest at Manchester and hit eight sixes in a hundred against an English XI . . .

  Miller’s forward play is unrivalled in splendour. He is the grandest player of cricket’s grandest stroke, the drive. Left shoulder and elbow lead his body in unison with the thrust of his left foot towards the ball. As a thermometer responds to the sun’s warmth, the height of his backswing varies in accordance with his estimate of the ball’s quality. If he judges it to be coming within range of his matchless drive his swing is as full as a six-footer can keep in control throughout its menacing arc; his hands extend back to neck height and cocked wrists point the bat skyward. At the moment of impact straight arms transmit the energy of true-lined shoulders to whipping wrists. Usually the ball is close to his front pad before the bat smashes through and onwards in the direction the shot has taken. To put the kernel of his style in one sentence, he wields the straightest bat with the greatest power. When Miller springs a stride or two forward both feet grip the pitch for the drive as firmly as when he advances only the front leg, and the purchase they obtain forces his knees inward.

  Distinctively his own is a rhythmic lunge with leg and bat seemingly moving together towards the ball, and his body bowing into the stroke as if giving it a benediction. This is more noticeable because nothing like it has been seen in an Australian since the back foot began to rule Test batting in the 1930s, and even before that no stylist made quite the same motion. To me, Miller’s lunge is the truest gauge of his form. When playing well, he delivers it as positively as a boxer’s classic straight left, whether he drives at boundary finding strength or extends himself to the limit to kill a testing ball in its tracks. If he is out of touch, good bowlers draw him into it too often; the lunge becomes overborne as he stretches to a ball he should have jumped to, or perhaps gone back on. Instead of being a firm anchor, his back leg drags across the crease as a shuffling extra line of defence. Sometimes balance fails him and he props himself up with his right hand or sprawls, full length, on both hands, like a physical culturist doing the body-press – as when he was stumped off Hollies in the Oval Test, 1948.

  In this manly athlete’s straight-bat strokes force is harnessed to a line as classic as a Corinthian column, but it bursts into full view, unrestrained, when he lets go for a hit to leg. His left side leads so strongly into the blow that the follow-through screws his clean-cut frame into spiral shape; he looks as if a willy-willy2 has spun his body around, as if he would revolve if it were not for his staying right foot, twisted over on its outside by the blockhole. No other batsman puts such plunging power into a pull or similar swinging leg hit. (For the like, you have to see American baseballers.) After adding its part to the speed of the bat, his right arm sometimes gets left behind; the hand slips off, like a wheel from a racing car careering around a bend. When this happened as he hit the accurate Toshack’s left-arm bowling for three sixes in one over it looked as if he swept the ball over the leg fence of the Melbourne ground with one hand. Watching the ball cannoning about the vast concrete stand, Ponsford (who fielded against Woolley, Constantine, Chapman and all the other famous hitters between the World Wars) said Miller’s strokes were the most powerful he had ever seen. Miller made things so warm in his 153 that every time he shaped to hit Toshack to leg people in the ringside seats got ready to duck behind the fence’s iron pickets . . .

  The one-sided Test rubber in 1946–7 presented little challenge to Miller’s imagination to bring forth such stirring innings as his side’s need had produced for the Services. Yet his 79 in the first Test contained the most high-bred batting of the match, and his six over long on to the roof of the members’ citadel was the longest ever hit on Brisbane’s Woolloongabba ground. His 79 runs and 7 wickets for 60 in the first innings were a record opening double for Anglo-Australian Tests.

  After the Englishmen opene
d on Adelaide Oval with their highest Test score of the season, 460, Miller responded with the most glorious innings of the rubber. The shutters were hardly down on the fourth morning when he hooked the first delivery of the day, a no-ball, over midwicket for six; only a player with his relaxed readiness could have done business so instantly. The ball soared high over girls depositing lunch bags and patting cushions into place, unaware that the proceedings had opened. It descended smack in front of the vice-regal box – a six almost subversive. Sunshine gleamed on Miller’s hair and his circling bat as his front-of-the-wicket shots explored the outskirts of the 208-yard-long field and he cut with such downright style that the ball often ricocheted shoulder high past the slips. His batting, distinguished and dictatorial, threatened the bowlers with utter subjection. To save them, Yardley resorted to spreading six fieldsmen around the leg field and bowling on the leg stump. Australia’s position made the stakes too high for Miller – for all the slice of gambler in his make-up – to take risks trying to smash the accurate leg-theory. Later, when the tail end was reached with Australia still behind, he put aside the curb, and the crowd laughed at the unprecedented sight of four longfields strung across the northern reach of the oval. Two attempts were made to catch him – one chance was so hot that the fieldsman dropped it as if it were a radioactive chunk from Bikini – but when Australia’s last wicket fell Miller was unconquered for 141, and he had seen his team through to a lead of 27.

  Australia’s next crisis came on the fifth day of the low-scoring final Test at Sydney, when the Englishmen were within touching distance of victory. Though favoured by luck in a dropped slip catch which enabled Bradman to go from 2 to 63, the Australians were struggling on a pitch responsive enough to make Bedser and Wright difficult for the best batsmen and almost unplayable by the rest. The pair looked capable of rooting out the lower division in a few overs. Only one batsman remained with technique adequate for the task – Miller. Down came a couple of snorters from Bedser which leaped from the pitch like fast leg breaks; tense onlookers in line with the wicket gasped as the tall batsman survived them. In a do-or-die situation Miller tossed his head and struck back, not with desperate slogging but by singling out balls of lesser menace and daringly using his reach to drive them over the eager ring of fieldsmen. While hours of strain had everybody else keyed up, he was enjoying himself. He rolled in a half-somersault to complete a cheeky run. When his partner, McCool, made the winning hit for three Miller stole a stump after running two, carried it with him on the last lap, then gave it to England’s top scorer, Compton, fulfilling his promise to get Denis a souvenir. Writing of those Tests, ex-wicketkeeper B. A. Barnett said: ‘Miller is undoubtedly Australia’s most attractive batsman, as well as cricket personality.’